In this series on managing the digital revolution, Ari Aronson and Stephan Argent collect insights from both the agency and the brand sides of the street.
This week, Marketing contributor Ari Aronson reaches out to the president and COO of Leo Burnett Canada to get an idea how the agency is navigating its way through the digital marketing revolution.
Leo Burnett’s Dom Caruso.
We have seen a shift from stand-alone digital agencies to a more integrated agency offering. How has digital impacted your org chart and agency offering? Is digital a separate P&L?
What we reinforce here is that we’re “One team, one dream.” It’s Judy John’s phrase, and it’s the simplest way of summing up what we’re about and how we approach digital, design, experiential and every other area of communication that a client needs. We’ve found loud and clear “one team” is what clients want right now, and how they want to see digital working. Some amazing clients have hired us over the past couple of years – IKEA, Yellow Pages Group, LCBO, TD, Enbridge, and recently Molson Coors – and they all resonated with our integrated model for digital. It’s helped us differentiate because some of the other network shops in town aren’t set up our way, they tend to have a separate business unit focusing on digital. For us, it’s about integrating the expertise within each brand team and within each department. We’ve positioned for that shift. And the success we’ve had with new clients indicates that there’s traction for how we’re doing it as one team.
What’s your vision for the future of digital in your agency?
Core to being a great marketing communications person now, and increasingly in the future, — whether you’re creative or planning or account management — is that digital is so natural we don’t even use the word anymore. We are here to help brands create the perceptual shift they need to succeed, to bring ideas that will bring their brand purpose to life, and to create programs that solve their specific business problems. We need great ideas to achieve that, and the ability to use any and all of the platforms that we have on hand to make them real. Aiding that means we have to have great champions in our creative leaders, enablers in creative technology to make ideas real, and analytics people to identify opportunities that will inspire new content. The future for us is to be a branded content agency. If you create interesting content, then you start to create your own audience and the brand in the end becomes its own media. As this grows, and as the digital role that we play for our clients increases, it’s really going to help us get closer to our clients and their business. We think the agencies that are really going to rise to the top are going to be the ones that are really going to act like an integrated part of the brand. It’ll increasingly be hard to separate the role that we play versus what our clients are playing. So in the past where we were primarily being the megaphone for the branded messages that the client wanted, we’ll be operating in a way that’s much closer and much more integrated with our clients.
What areas of digital do you do in-house? And what areas do you outsource and why?
We have a core production group that works very closely with creative people on the vast majority of what we do. Where we tend to use outside resources is when we have a highly specialized need, and there’s a vast network of talents we tap into for that in town and around the world. We think that’s a great balance. We find in a lot of things we do, we need to work in an agile way where we’ll try something out, prototype it quickly, which we do with our creative guys right in there. The fact that our creative guys are here, and our production guys are here, really helps ensure we create something that’s going to be at the level of creativity and quality that we’re all going to be proud of.
What are the unique and creative ways digital is impacting traditional mass work?
I think one of the things digital is doing at a macro level is reinforcing the importance of having a clear brand purpose for each brand that we work on. In the past, a lot of energy would be put into two or three creative pieces because that’s all you were doing all year, right? You were going to have a TV ad, and you were going to have a print ad, and a radio ad or something. And because you were only doing those three pieces of communication all year, there would be a lot of energy just spent on those. What digital has done, and what social has done, is said to everyone “Okay, well now we can have a lot more than just a few pieces happening throughout the year. We can get a lot more volume happening.” And to be able to manage that has really, from a strategy point of view, created a new need which is: we need a very simple and informative guideline for how to communicate with people in a world where we can do many more things in the course of a year. And that’s where really having clarity on what the brand’s human purpose is, is absolutely essential. The most important decision a client and agency need to make together is: what is that brand’s human purpose? So if we get that right, and we feel okay it’s authentic, it really does relate to the brand, it really connects to the brand’s DNA, and it will inspire a wide range of interesting work that people are going to want to see and that’s going to help us do great things.
What are the biggest challenges you’re facing when it comes to working with clients from a digital perspective?
We’re in a world where volume, velocity and now-ness are going to matter more than perfection. That’s a pretty significant shift in mind-set for the industry. Most of us grew up with the mentality that it can’t go out till it’s perfect. Now we’re in a world where, if we’re working to a brand purpose that client and agency are 100% aligned on, we’re going to be doing a lot more in a month and set ourselves for opportunities to take advantage of “now” whenever we can. The great news is we have clients already that are embracing that mindset, and helping us move towards this kind of real-time marketing. A great example of that recently for us was our lint roller give-away for IKEA during the Raptors playoffs. We saw an opportunity to extend the IKEA #HouseRules campaign in the moment, and had the client fully behind it to say yes.
Are clients generally open or cautious when it comes to pushing digital boundaries?
This is going to sound funny, but I think clients should be less cautious in some ways and more cautious in others. Where I think clients need to apply being cautious is on all the upfront conversations that need to happen with the agency partners. What are the guard rails for this brand? What is the voice for this brand? How do we want to talk to people? What are the brand associations we make? There has to be a shared vision for what the brand’s digital and social presence will be. If we’ve done a good job on making sure there is alignment we can be more comfortable with saying yes to more ideas, faster. The reality is not every idea will take off, but some are going to get great traction. By being clear on what you want your voice to be and what the brand is about, then you’re going to just enable more opportunities to capture lightning in a bottle.
What advice do you have for senior marketers when it comes to getting the most out of their digital and traditional agency partners?
I would say its three things. First and foremost, get to the brand’s human purpose. Get alignment on that. That is the most important single decision a client and agency need to make together. Once you have a clear and compelling purpose, you can unleash creativity and branded content. Second, get to the real business problem for each brief. One of the things that digital enables is a short-circuit to solving a small business problem. It helps us say “Hey, there might be a more direct way to just solve that problem.” We’re going to enable that if there’s clarity on the real problem to be solved. I think it is something that clients and agencies can do better. The third thing is, get comfortable with volume and velocity and operating in real-time.
How can clients help your agency do even better work for them?
Clients have enormous power in getting to great work. They can create an environment that celebrates great work, and is always eager to share great work they’ve seen and admire. If they show they’re passionate about great creative work, it has a very positive effect on an agency and the kind of output they’ll generate. Clients can also get great work happening by giving agencies the time to fully explore the possibilities. We get that we’re in a world that is moving fast and requires agility. Yet the truth is time does help the work. Finally, clients and agencies together need be spiritual partners in pioneering and experimentation. Even though we’re seeing a stabilization in the platforms that we have available to us, there’s lots of room to experiment and prototype a new way. There are going be successes, and there’s going to be the occasional failures. And we just have to be comfortable with that and just say it’s all part of pioneering a new space.
What key lessons have you learned when it comes to doing great digital work?
Experiential ideas that cross the real and digital world can drive amazing social engagement. That’s certainly been true with the Walking Dead and the IKEA events we do. We’ve also learned that great digital sometimes is not a straight path where Step A leads to Step B leads to Step C. It’s not necessarily perfectly sequential. It means we need to be in a mode where we can prototype fast, see how it works and continually evolve. For example, for one client we pioneered using annotations within a YouTube video to create a contest that drove daily engagement. It was still a very new idea at that point that required an agile, prototype-and-see approach that finally became great award-winning work.
As an agency, how do you stay at the forefront of digital and social media and how do you lead clients when it comes to innovation and creativity?
It starts and ends with talent. Staying at the forefront means hiring great people. A recent hire that we’ve done and is keeping us at the forefront is bringing Sean Ohlenkamp here. Sean is not only an extremely strong digital guy, he’s just a great creative guy, full stop. He’s also helping inspire us on our never-ending culture of curiosity. If you stay curious, you’ll always be aware of new developments and be excited about the possibilities. Recently we launched a learning program called Sharpening, which is a combination of seminars and bulletins each focused on a key topic. Last week we did Prototyping. This week it was Mobile: Beyond the App. That’s all aimed at this culture of curiosity.
We’re evolving from thinking about social content calendars to thinking about how we can take advantage of what’s in zeitgeist right now and how our brands can leverage that moment of relevance.
Finally, we have to embrace the evolution of digital as a branding platform. It used to be all about the click, despite the fact that only a micro-sliver of the audience ever clicked. That’s changing fast. With programmatic buying, the ability to buy classic Reach and Frequency GRPs that we all know and love, and the superior ability to target people, dayparts and behaviour, digital will be the central channel for brand work and will demand even more volume of creative content. The key implication of that, of course, is how will that increased content be paid for when the total marketing spend isn’t increasing. That’s where digital’s superior ability to target comes in. By targeting better, we can free up paid-media dollars and spend that back on the creative content the brand needs.
Ari Aronson is founder of Ari Agency, a boutique executive recruitment agency specializing in digital
